s > r (Iberian)

[bwald]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
In passing, I noticed Alan King acknowledge a correction by Miguel
Carrasquer.  Alan wrote:
 
>Yes, a slip.  I guess I was thinking of intervocalic s > z, and the fact
>that besides Castilian, both Galician and Romanian are also exempt from
>this general Romance development.  In Castilian and Galician (but NOT in
>Romanian, as you point out), there is no /z/ phoneme.  I was confusing
>these two things.
 
I am curious about this situation because I have long had the impression
that what is historically distinctive of Castillian and the Spanish-area
around it, but not extending to Portuguese, Catalan or other adjacent
Romance languages is the *devoicing* of voiced fricatives, /z/ > /s/ among
them.  That is, I never thought that the ancestor of Castiliian, Spanish,
whatever, was exempt from the EARLIER Romance process of intervocalic
voicing of Latin -s- (among other sounds), but that by LATER developments
it devoiced the resulting -z- (in most environments -- in general,in
effect).  Similarly, /zh/, as in ancestral "*g*ente" 'people' (current
"*h*ente"), was devoiced, something like /zh/ > /sh=c,/ (ichlaut) (> h),
cf. ojala (o*h=x*ala:) < Arabic in*SH*alla:h 'God willing'.  As far as I
know, such fricative devoicing is a distinctive feature of the divergence
of Spanish from other Romance languages, and Spanish should be celebrated
as a language which exemplifies historical devoicing of (certain)
fricatives (the ones made with the tongue against the palate).
 
P.S.  Interesting in Spanish is the tenacity of the devoicing, so that
rather than revoice intervocalically, /s/ has a tendency (found elsewhere)
to reduce to "pure" devoicing, i.e., /h/ (and ultimately loss of the
segment).  Though /s/ > /h/ also occurs before consonants, the tenacity is
reminiscent of the previous movement of /sh/ to the back, to /x/ or /h/,
rather than toward "revoicing" in any environment.  (Unlike /s/, /sh/ only
occurred before vowels.  /s/ could easily be neutral or even associated
with the phoneme /sh/ before consonants, cf. Portuguese, and, indeed, the
numerous studies of s > h variable dialects of Spanish find that s > h is
more favored to occur before a consonant than a vowel, cf. the history of
French /s/+consonant.)
 
In a separate message, Robert Ratcliffe wrote:
 
>But in general I do not see any reason to assume
>that no sound change is reversible given enough time.
 
It should be made clear that the issue is directionality of sound change.
The issue of "reversibility" usually implies that the set of words affected
by the first sound change remain distinct at the time of the second sound
change.  However, the "given enough time" qualification suggests that
preservation of the identity of the class of words is not at issue (since
other changes will most often obscure the original word class affected).
The issue is only that a second sound change HAPPENS to be the reverse of
the first one -- but historically has nothing to do with the first change.
According to my understanding, Latin s > z and then Spanish z > s
illustrates this point.